Digital Storm Black Ops Assassin Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
Digital Storm’s Black Ops Assassin is one killer PC with an asking price that, while certainly not cheap, is impressive considering this PC approaches the performance of über-PCs that cost much more. Read More…

What We Liked…

Very impressive high-end performance for the price

Luxurious SilverStone case

What We Didn’t…

Interior packing foam hard to remove

Top-mounted “back panel” takes some getting used to

No USB 3.0, SATA3 ports

Digital Storm Black Ops Assassin Review

With a price tag hovering around $3,400, there's no way to pass off Digital Storm’s Black Ops Assassin as an affordable mainstream-gaming and productivity PC. While you can, of course, configure the PC as you like before buying one from Digital Storm's site, this particular line of computers still starts at a hefty-enough $1,781. Simply put, the Black Ops Assassin is an expensive beast of a gaming PC, but to put the outlay in perspective, we’d suggest that you start by looking over Maingear’s Shift, which we reviewed last year. The Shift remains our benchmark champion on most fronts, but to hit those highest of high frame rates, our configuration of the Shift was saddled with a staggering $7,100 price tag at the time of our review. (It has since dropped a bit; more on that later.) While the passage of time inevitably brings better performance at a lower price, it's still plenty impressive that our test configuration of the Assassin comes at all close to the Shift's performance, at less than half the price. And both systems sport similarly impressive cases, as well.

Our configuration of the Black Ops Assassin came equipped with an Intel Core i7-930 four-core CPU. That chip is originally clocked at 2.8GHz, but here comes overclocked to a 3.2GHz base, which means that, on the fly, it can swing as high as 3.9GHz, depending on how many cores are being used and what their workload might be. The Maingear Shift was loaded out with an Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition processor with a 3.3GHz clock speed, overclocked to 3.98GHz, similar to the Assassin's overclocked speed.

To flex that CPU, we rolled out an arsenal of tests. Our suite of CPU-centric tests consists of the Cinebench 10 test, transcoding a video in Windows Media Encoder, and converting 11 standard MP3 files to AAC format in iTunes. While these media-conversion tests are a breeze for PCs in this class, they're also a good indication of a system's productivity abilities. Plus, Cinebench taxes all available CPU cores, showing just what a PC can do with multi-threaded software like video editors and Adobe's Creative Suite.

Yes, that's all packing foam you see here. It's a big enough ordeal getting it all out of the case's innards before you use the PC—but imagine getting it all back in if you have to ship the system out for repair!

And while our configuration of the Black Ops Assassin slipped in at less than half the price of last year's Maingear Shift, its scores in this trio of tests were less than 10 percent lower than those of the Shift. If that's not enough to convince you that this PC is impressively fast for the price, read on.

Our next test, PCMark Vantage, incorporates a slew of synthetic trials to measure overall system performance, making it perhaps the best benchmark test by which you can get a good sense of just how comparable two systems are. The Shift's score of 19,389 in this test still easily bests the Black Ops Assassin's showing of 16,519, but that equates to a roughly 15 percent performance difference in this test. Unless you're just looking to unload a few thousand dollars extra for ultimate bragging rights, that makes the Black Ops Assassin a smarter "value" choice between these two powerhouse PCs, if you look at raw performance.

The inside of the case is quite roomy, but PCI-slot expansion is scarce. The two huge graphics cards block all but one free PCIe slot.

Digital Storm stocked the Black Ops Assassin with twin GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards, currently the fastest Nvidia makes. The Shift we looked at sported a trio of ATI Radeon HD 5870 cards. You don’t get to the top of the heap (in either price or performance) by scrimping on the go-fast parts. In retrospect, though, considering the already over-the-top pricing of the Shift, maybe Maingear should have packed in a trio of dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards instead, because the trio of cards in the Shift didn't put it far ahead of the Black Ops Assassin's dual-card setup, in our tests.

In an unusual design, the cables on this PC's SilverStone case plug into the top and snake out the back. Once the case's top cover is attached, though, everything looks very clean.

In Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage test, an overall measure of 3D-graphics performance, the Black Ops Assassin actually bested the Shift in the test's Entry, Performance, and High modes. The Shift did manage to eke out a win at the test's Extreme setting, scoring 20,653 to the Assassin's 18,437. But again, that's a minuscule difference considering that the Shift was priced at more than twice as much when we reviewed it. To be fair to Maingear, we went back to the company's configuration page and repriced the Shift in a configuration as close to our original test system as was possible. What we ended up with was a machine with a slightly slower processor (a Core i7-970, not the Core i7-975 in our review rig) at a price just north of $5,500. The Shift has more storage—a 2TB hard drive and a pair of 80GB Intel solid-state drives (SSDs), versus the Assassin's single 128GB SSD and 1TB hard drive—but that's still a huge price difference given these systems' similar performance.

Where the Shift did sprint ahead of the Black Ops Assassin was when we used the built-in test in one of our standard real-world test games, Far Cry 2. Even then, however, the Shift clocked 170 frames per second (fps) at 2,560x1,600 resolution against the Assassin’s 141fps. Once again, that's only about a 15 percent performance difference, and that's at an extreme resolution found only on 30-inch monitors. With games this demanding, the performance difference between the systems even at the highest resolutions won't be visible.

Where it may make more real-world difference, however, is with next-generation DirectX 11 titles. While we’re not really awash in DirectX 11 games at this point, the Black Ops Assassin was able to eke out nearly 37fps from Heaven, the DirectX 11 benchmark test we use, at 2,560x1,600 resolution, showing that even games that will be hitting the market in the near future should be playable at extremely high resolutions on this machine. And that resolution bears emphasis: Considering that gaming at 2,560x1,600 requires a $1,000-plus 30-inch display, not many people will opt for that level of monitor madness. (That said, if you were considering the Shift in the version we tested and decided to go with the Black Ops Assassin instead, you could nearly buy a pair of 30-inch screens with the money you'd save.)

The top ports are limited to a pair of USB ports and audio jacks. This slide-down cover hides them when they aren't needed.

Adding more components to the Black Ops Assassin is no big deal—unless you’re thinking about PCI-card expansion. The two double-width GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards block almost everything, PCI-slot-wise, on the motherboard. Two free PCI Express slots are visible, but you’d practically need a two-dimensional card make use of the slot adjacent to the second GTX 480.

External expansion options are more abundant. You'll find dual USB 2.0 ports behind a sliding panel up top, and another eight on the motherboard's back panel. Note, though, that the "back panel" is actually found at the top of this PC, under a removable hood that covers the clutter and provides a channel for cables to exit the rear of the case. That's right: Like the Shift, this system's motherboard is rotated 90 degrees from its normal orientation, in a setup designed to allow air to flow naturally up and out of the case. (The chassis, by the way, is the SilverStone Fortress FT02, which we found to be one of the nicest cases we've ever reviewed, even if popping off that top hood every time you want to access one of the eight USB ports is irksome.)

Although lifting the top hood is fairly simple (grab it by the inside handle, jerk it upwards), actually getting inside the case for the first time to remove the packaging material is a real hassle. The side panel comes off easily enough, but what’s then exposed are dense foam filler pads tucked into every nook and cranny of the case to keep things from moving around during shipment. We certainly appreciate the care in packaging, as big graphics cards tend to wreak havoc when shipped installed in a PC without lots of bracing. (Trust us, we've seen the sorry results on several occasions: namely, a broken motherboard.) Getting the pads out is just a matter of patience and attention (they’re everywhere) but repacking the system to send it off for repair would be a major ordeal. Like we saw with iBuypower's LAN Warrior II, gaming-PC companies are now resorting to extreme use of foam packaging to keep those heavy graphics cards in check.

As noted, the main cluster of cables connects to the top of the case, not the back. A large hood covers the area when you’re done and neatens things up, but as noted, it makes it tricky to access all those USB ports quickly.

While it's certainly pricey, the Digital Storm Black Ops Assassin is an investment-caliber gaming PC that, depending on how you configure it, doesn’t necessarily require mortgage-level refinancing to own. It delivers performance well beyond what its relative pricing suggests. We wish it had next-generation USB 3.0 and SATA3 (6Gbps) ports for a bit more future-proofing, but adding those ports after the fact can be done by simply slotting in an inexpensive expansion card like the Asus U3S6. After all, you'll certainly save enough money versus going with certain other boutique-PC makers.

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